ABSTRACT
Gestalt’s focus on the ‘here and now’ was born out of Fritz Perls’ criticism of Freud’s archaeological approach to therapy. Perls asserted that, ‘there is no other reality than the present’ and in collaboration with the co-founders of gestalt therapy developed a brilliant explication of the here and now moment at a time when almost all around were concentrating on the archaic. A clinical mistake in gestalt therapy is to work in the here and now detached from other time zones, a dissociated process closer to psychosis than health. Part of the therapeutic task in gestalt therapy is to focus on immediate awareness, to notice the subtle ways in which direct relating may be sidestepped through ‘talking about’ in the past tense or imagining the future. However, although a choiceful intervention may be to disclose the impact the client is having on them, here and now relating is not an excuse for indiscriminate self-disclosure.
